Dancer Fitzgerald Sample

Last updated
Dancer Fitzgerald Sample (DFS)
Type Private
Industry Advertising
Founded1923
Defunct1987
FateAcquired by Saatchi & Saatchi
SuccessorSaatchi & Saatchi DFS (renamed back to Saatchi & Saatchi later on)
Headquarters New York City, United States
Subsidiaries The Program Exchange (1979–1987)

Dancer Fitzgerald Sample (DFS and later DFS-Dorland) was a Madison Avenue advertising agency during the 20th century. It was founded in Chicago in 1923, and was acquired and merged into the Saatchi & Saatchi network in the 1980s.

Contents

History

The agency was founded in 1923 by Hill Blackett and John Glen Sample, in Chicago. E. Frank Hummert joined the agency in 1927, and it was renamed Blackett-Sample-Hummert, even though Hummert was never a partner in the company. Blackett left company management, despite remaining a partner, when he was commissioned into the U.S. Navy in 1942. Hummert left the company at the end of 1943, forming Hummert Radio Productions with his wife Anne. Sample, after unsuccessful attempts to buy out the absent Blackett, announced that they would allow the firm to dissolve when their partnership agreement expired in 1944, and that he would enter a new partnership with B-S-H president Howard M. "Mix" Dancer at that time. [1] These plans were later altered to terminate the partnership earlier, on January 1, 1944, with Blackett forming his own firm and Dancer and Sample adding as a partner Clifford L. Fitzgerald, then a B-S-H vice president and director. [2] Sample left the agency in 1948 and moved full-time to Florida, where he became a real-estate developer; [3] Dancer died while on vacation in Antigua in 1958. [4] The company itself moved from Chicago to New York in 1948 to be closer to the center of the television business. [5]

Dancer Fitzgerald entered the European market in 1970, joining forces with the UK firm Dorland Advertising Holdings to form DFS-Dorland International through an exchange of stock among the two companies' owners. The combined firms reported $237 million in revenues at the time. [6] DFS unwound its interests in DFS-Dorland International in 1979, while maintaining business connections with the London firm. [7]

DFS purchased Val-Mar Studios, a Mexican animation studio in 1959, and became Gamma Productions. It used the studio to produce television cartoons for Jay Ward Productions and Total Television; the studio closed in 1968. Its productions remain in reruns, distributed through The Program Exchange. DFS founded Program Syndication Services in 1973 and The Program Exchange in 1979. DFS acquired the much smaller Gilbert, Felix & Sharf agency in 1979. [8] That same year, DFS left its long-time 347 Madison Avenue office space and two other Manhattan locations to consolidate in the Chrysler Building. [9]

After three years of discussions, [7] on February 24, 1986, Saatchi & Saatchi agreed to fund a $75 million management buyout of Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, under which five DFS managers would create a new company, DFS Management, to buy out the company's 202 shareholders, ultimately merging the new company with Saatchi's much smaller Dorland Advertising under the name DFS Dorland Worldwide. The deal was structured to avoid conflicts of interest between Dancer Fitzgerald's and Saatchi's client bases, but Saatchi & Saatchi would have the option to take complete control at any time. [5] At that time, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample was the thirteenth largest advertising agency in the US, with billings of $876 million and clients including Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Toyota, Sara Lee and RJR Nabisco. The new DFS Dorland Worldwide network was to be operated independently from the Saatchi & Saatchi Compton Worldwide network and was at that time the sixteenth largest agency network in the world. [10]

Saatchi & Saatchi announced on June 22, 1987, that the DFS/Dorland merger would be unwound, and it would pay $25 million to buy out the remaining minority shareholders and merge DFS with its other US unit, Saatchi & Saatchi Compton. [11] At that point the merged business became the largest agency in New York with billings of $2.3 billion. The consolidation ended DFS's relationship with Dorland, which at that point was the third-largest London agency. [10]

Legacy

In 1979, DFS created McGruff the Crime Dog. [12]

A famous line to come out of DFS in the 1980s was the pop-culture hit "Where's the beef?" created for Wendy's by DFS creative director Cliff Freeman.

In 1973, they created the Duracell Bunny, which has become an icon in all countries except the United States and Canada.

Related Research Articles

Saatchi & Saatchi is a British multinational communications and advertising agency network with 114 offices in 76 countries and over 6,500 staff. It was founded in 1970 and is currently headquartered in London. The parent company of the agency group was known as Saatchi & Saatchi PLC from 1976 to 1994, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange until 2000 and, for a time, was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. In 2000, the group was acquired by the Publicis Groupe. In 2005 it went private.

Maurice Nathan Saatchi, Baron Saatchi is a British-Iraqi businessman, and with his brother, Charles, co-founder of the advertising agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and M&C Saatchi.

DFS may refer to:

Folgers American coffee brand

Folgers Coffee is a brand of ground, instant, and single-use pod coffee produced in the United States, and sold there, and also in Asia, Canada and Mexico. It forms part of the food and beverage division of The J.M. Smucker Company.

Ketchum Inc.

Ketchum Inc. is a global public relations firm, offering marketing, branding, and corporate communications services in the corporate, healthcare, food and beverage, and technology industries. George Ketchum founded the firm as a Pittsburgh-based advertising company in 1923. It later evolved to include a public relations practice. The firm is headquartered in New York City, with auxiliary offices and affiliates in North America, EMEA, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. The agency has been owned by Omnicom Group since 1996. Ketchum merged with Düsseldorf-based Pleon in one of the industry's largest mergers in 2009. It has been led by President and CEO Mike Doyle since 2020.

Publicis French multinational advertising and public relations company

Publicis Groupe is a French multinational advertising and public relations company. One of the oldest and largest marketing and communications companies in the world by revenue, it is headquartered in Paris.

The Program Exchange

The Program Exchange was a syndicator of television programs. It was founded as DFS Program Exchange in 1979, which became elongated to the DFS-Dorland Program Exchange from 1986 to 1987. From 1986 to 2008, it was a division of Saatchi & Saatchi, an advertising agency, while merging with Dorland Advertising in 1986, and would later be acquired by Publicis in 2000. In January 2008, Publicis transferred The Program Exchange from the Saatchi & Saatchi subsidiary to its ZenithOptimedia subsidiary, the logo was then changed to reflect this move. In early 2016, the programexchange.com website was shut down; the shutdown coincided with NBCUniversal's purchase of one of its most prominent clients, DreamWorks Classics.

Clint Frank American football player and advertising executive (1915–1992)

Clinton E. Frank was an American football player and advertising executive. He played halfback for Yale University, where he won both the Heisman Trophy and Maxwell Award in 1937. In 1954, he founded the Clinton E. Frank, Inc. advertising agency.

Dentsu Advertising and public relations company

Dentsu Inc. is a Japanese international advertising and public relations joint stock company headquartered in Tokyo. Dentsu is currently the largest advertising agency in Japan and the fifth largest advertising agency network in the world in terms of worldwide revenues.

William Everett Luckey was an American animator, artist, cartoonist, composer, illustrator, musician, singer and voice actor. He worked at the animation studio Pixar, where he worked as a character designer on a number of films, including Toy Story, Boundin', Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, Cars and Ratatouille. Luckey was also the voice of Rick Dicker in The Incredibles, Chuckles the Clown in Toy Story 3 and as Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh (2011).

Bozell Public relations and ad agency

Bozell is an American full-service public relations and advertising agency in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, North America.

Anne Hummert American radio soap opera writer

Anne Hummert was the leading creator of daytime radio serials or soap opera dramas during the 1930s and 1940s, responsible for more than three dozen series.

Mojo was an Australian advertising agency formed in Sydney by Alan Morris ("Mo") and Allan Johnston ("Jo") in 1979. Its lineage can today be traced to the Australian offices of Publicis, an Australian subsidiary of the French multinational advertising and communications company holding Publicis Groupe. Those offices traded as Publicis Mojo from the late 1990s until 2016.

McCann, formerly McCann Erickson, is an American global advertising agency network, with offices in 120 countries. McCann is part of McCann Worldgroup, along with several other agencies, including direct digital marketing agency MRM//McCann, experiential marketing agency Momentum Worldwide, healthcare marketing group McCann Health, branding firm FutureBrand, and public-relations and strategic-communications agency Weber Shandwick.

Vernive Hill Blackett was a radio daytime-advertising pioneer who played a major part in the development of the soap opera.

Edward Frank Hummert, Jr., professionally known as Frank Hummert and sometimes credited as E. Frank Hummert, was an American advertising agent originally but was best known for writing/producing episodes of nearly 100 daytime/primetime radio dramas and soap opera serials between the 1930s and the 1950s.

<i>Johns Other Wife</i>

John's Other Wife is an American old-time radio soap opera. It was broadcast on NBC-Red from September 14, 1936, until March 1940. In that month it moved to NBC-Blue, where it ran until March 20, 1942.

James J. Spanfeller Jr. is an American media executive best known for running Forbes.com from 2001–2009. He is currently the CEO of G/O Media which consists primarily of sites that were previously part of Gawker Media. Spanfeller was hired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners to run the company after it was purchased from Univision. He is also a past Chairman of the IAB and longtime executive board member of Digital Content Next (DCN).

The Greenville, South Carolina-based Henderson Agency was founded in 1946 by James M. Henderson, who put in considerable effort to recruit "smart creatives."

Roy Sarles Durstine was an American newspaper reporter, author, and advertising executive who co-founded BBDO and since 1939 was president of Roy S. Durstine, Inc.

References

  1. ↑ "Reorganization Plan Outlined For Blackett-Sample-Hummert". Broadcasting and Broadcast Advertising . Washington, D.C.: Broadcasting Publications, Inc. 25 (7): 12. August 16, 1943.
  2. ↑ "Two New Agencies Organized From Dissolution of B-S-H". Broadcasting and Broadcast Advertising. 25 (12): 8. September 20, 1943.
  3. ↑ "Deaths". Broadcasting. 81 (29): 51. December 6, 1971.
  4. ↑ "H. M. Dancer Is Dead". The New York Times. November 25, 1958. H. M. Dancer, chairman of the board of Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample, Inc., an advertising agency with headquarters at 347 Madison Avenue, died of a heart attack on Friday while on vacation in Antigua, British West Indies.
  5. 1 2 Dougherty, Philip H. (February 25, 1986). "S. & S. Unit and D.F.S. Deal Seen". The New York Times: D27. ProQuest   110859119.
  6. ↑ Dougherty, Philip H. (March 2, 1970). "Advertising: Dancer Joins the Foreign Set". The New York Times: 52. ProQuest   119155070.
  7. 1 2 "Dancer and Dorland Holding Talks". The New York Times: D23. June 23, 1983. ProQuest   122140492.
  8. ↑ "Gilbert, Felix Merging into Dancer-Fitzgerald". The New York Times: D12. January 5, 1979. ProQuest   121024176.
  9. ↑ Horsley, Carter S. (July 19, 1978). "About Real Estate: Commercial Tenants and the Shuffle Dance". The New York Times: A18. ProQuest   123633359.
  10. 1 2 Goldman, Kevin (1997). Conflicting Accounts: The Creation & Crash of the Saatchi & Saatchi Empire. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN   0-684-83553-3.
  11. ↑ Freilich, Ellen (June 23, 1987). "Saatchi Compton to Merge with Dancer Agency in U.S.". The Washington Post. New York. United Press International. p. E10. ProQuest   139223548.
  12. ↑ Dougherty, Philip H. (May 15, 1979). "Advertising: Ad Dog to Fight Crime". The New York Times: D15. ProQuest   120863379. I don't promise to wipe it out," Mr. Keil said, referring to crime, "but to take a bite out of it.

See also

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.